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There is a black market,with no recourse for compensation in case of failure. Were this legal, and yes, I think it should be, I think that at least 10’s of thousands of lives can be saved. There are many people who are hard put upon who can receive a significant payday while at the same time saving lives of 10’s if not hundreds of thousands, or maybe if it was globally applied millions of lives, on both sides.

On one side, you have those beneficiaries of the organs that are willing donated from a live donor, (kindeys, skin, and partial liver transplants) as well as those who are in such desperate measures that they will take such a risk. If it were legal, which I believe it should, then there would be additional protections requiring that the process is as safe as possible, such as a guarantee to next of kin, or an assigned beneficiary through a will that must be filed in advance of the procedure.

Another thing it can do, is allow prisoners to “will” their organs, in exchange for compensation posthumously, including deathrow inmates. THIS subject is the reason I support “Nitrogen Asphyxiation” as a humane and also beneficial method of execution, allowing scum, on a volunteer basis, to do something good with their death.

Other than The Soul, and the Mind, we are basically machines, and sometimes we can take advantage of the appropriate replacement part. Also This will open up a market that will save lives through biological exchange, as well as lives through contractual exchange, that will ALSO lead to a reduction in price, and rarity.

Saving lives through risk. I did that, Mesa did that, Most of my friends did that, and all we got was the pretty uniforms and a lot of pride. That was enough for me, but for others, they need something else. If whatever that something else saves lives, then I’m all for it.

And yes, you are hanging on, to the tired and the old — nothing new to see here.

No new message, no coherent thoughts. Just repeated whining that we’ve all seen before. As have your mentors; it’s trademark Saul Alinsky and how they got you all wound up this time.

This is an old post, but it applies to the current situation.

It may be half a decade later, but the message still applies:

What follows is an important read for everyone at this time in the history of our country. While our soldiers risk their lives in Iraq, Afghanistan and other parts of the world to fight terrorism where it lives, there are those who would call the US evil and colonialist and our soldiers pawns. They protest the war by holding up signs that read “War Criminals” at Walter Reed Hospital where our injured troops are recovering. They say they support our troops and call for an immediate withdrawal from Iraq in the same sentence. They exercise their freedom of speech by glorifying dictators like Chavez and Castro while comparing our president to Hitler.

The same sort of thing happened in the sixties and seventies because of our involvement in Vietnam. We eventually left that country and let it descend into chaos and murder.

Pat Conroy was a young man during the Vietnam war. He was a protestor. He dodged the draft. He thought our government was evil and that our country had no right to send troops overseas.

He has had nearly forty years to reflect on the reasons for his actions and has come to a conclusion — he was a coward.

This should be a must read for anyone under thirty who questions why we are in Iraq. Anyone older than that or who also protested Vietnam and still hates their country should have their meds re-evaluated and upped.

The true things always ambush me on the road and take me by surprise when I am drifting down the light of placid days, careless about flanks and rearguard actions. I was not looking for a true thing to come upon me in the state of New Jersey. Nothing has ever happened to me in New Jersey. But came it did, and it came to stay.

In the past four years I have been interviewing my teammates on the 1966-67 basketball team at the Citadel for a book I’m writing. For the most part, this has been like buying back a part of my past that I had mislaid or shut out of my life. At first I thought I was writing about being young and frisky and able to run up and down a court all day long, but lately I realized I came to this book because I needed to come to grips with being middle-aged and having ripened into a
gray-haired man you could not trust to handle the ball on a fast break.

When I visited my old teammate Al Kroboth’s house in New Jersey, I spent the first hours quizzing him about his memories of games and practices and the screams of coaches that had echoed in field houses more than 30 years before. Al had been a splendid forward-center for the Citadel; at 6 feet 5 inches and carrying 220 pounds, he played with indefatigable energy and enthusiasm. For most of his senior year, he led the nation in field-goal percentage, with UCLA center Lew Alcindor hot on his trail. Al was a battler and a brawler and a scrapper from the day he first stepped in as a Green Weenie as a sophomore to the day he graduated. After we talked basketball, we came to a subject I dreaded to bring up with Al, but which lay between us and would not lie still.

“Al, you know I was a draft dodger and antiwar demonstrator.”

“That’s what I heard, Conroy,” Al said. “I have nothing against what you did, but I did what I thought was right.”

On his seventh mission as a navigator in an A-6 for Major Leonard Robertson, Al was getting ready to deliver their payload when the fighter-bomber was hit by enemy fire. Though Al has no memory of it, he punched out somewhere in the middle of the ill-fated dive and lost consciousness. He doesn’t know if he was unconscious for six hours or six days, nor does he know what happened to Major Robertson (whose name
is engraved on the Wall in Washington and on the MIA bracelet Al wears).

When Al awoke, he couldn’t move. A Viet Cong soldier held an AK-47 to his head. His back and his neck were broken, and he had shattered his left scapula in the fall. When he was well enough to get to his feet (he still can’t recall how much time had passed), two armed Viet Cong led Al from the jungles of South Vietnam to a prison in Hanoi. The journey took three months. Al Kroboth walked barefooted through the most impassable terrain in Vietnam, and he did it sometimes in the dead of night. He bathed when it rained, and he slept in bomb craters with his two Viet Cong captors. As they moved farther north, infections
began to erupt on his body, and his legs were covered with leeches picked up while crossing the rice paddies.

At the very time of Al’s walk, I had a small role in organizing the only antiwar demonstration ever held in Beaufort, South Carolina, the home of Parris Island and the Marine Corps Air Station. In a Marine Corps town at that time, it was difficult to come up with a quorum of people who had even minor disagreements about the Vietnam War. But my small group managed to attract a crowd of about 150 to Beaufort’s waterfront. With my mother and my wife on either side of me, we listened to the featured speaker, Dr. Howard Levy, suggest to the very few young enlisted Marines present that if they get sent to Vietnam, here’s how they can help end this war: Roll a grenade under your officer’s bunk when he’s asleep in his tent. It’s called fragging and is becoming more and more popular with the ground troops who know this war is bullshit. I was enraged by the suggestion. At that very moment my father, a Marine officer, was asleep in Vietnam. But in 1972, at the age of 27, I thought I was serving America’s interests by pointing out what massive flaws and miscalculations and corruptions had led her to conduct a ground war in Southeast Asia.

In the meantime, Al and his captors had finally arrived in the North, and the Viet Cong traded him to North Vietnamese soldiers for the final leg of the trip to Hanoi. Many times when they stopped to rest for the night, the local villagers tried to kill him. His captors wired his hands behind his back at night, so he trained himself to sleep in the center of huts when the villagers began sticking knives and bayonets into the thin walls.

Following the U.S. air raids, old women would come into the huts to excrete on him and yank out hunks of his hair. After the nightmare journey of his walk north, Al was relieved when his guards finally delivered him to the POW camp in Hanoi and the cell door locked behind him.

It was at the camp that Al began to die. He threw up every meal he ate and before long was misidentified as the oldest American soldier in the prison because his appearance was so gaunt and skeletal. But the extraordinary camaraderie among fellow prisoners that sprang up in all the POW camps caught fire in Al, and did so in time to save his life.

When I was demonstrating in America against Nixon and the Christmas bombings in Hanoi, Al and his fellow prisoners were holding hands under the full fury of those bombings, singing “God Bless America.” It was those bombs that convinced Hanoi they would do well to release the American POWs, including my college teammate. When he told me about the C-141 landing in Hanoi to pick up the prisoners, Al said he felt no emotion, none at all, until he saw the giant American flag painted on the plane’s tail. I stopped writing as Al wept over the memory of that flag on that plane, on that morning, during that time in the life of America.

It was that same long night, after listening to Al’s story, that I began to make judgments about how I had conducted myself during the Vietnam War.

In the darkness of the sleeping Kroboth household, lying in the third-floor guest bedroom, I began to assess my role as a citizen in the ’60s, when my country called my name and I shot her the bird. Unlike the stupid boys who wrapped themselves in Viet Cong flags and burned the American one, I knew how to demonstrate against the war without flirting with treason or astonishingly bad taste. I had come directly from the warrior culture of this country and I knew how to act.

But in the 25 years that have passed since South Vietnam fell, I have immersed myself in the study of totalitarianism during the unspeakable century we just left behind. I have questioned survivors of Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen, talked to Italians who told me tales of the Nazi occupation, French partisans who had counted German tanks in the forests of Normandy, and officers who survived the Bataan Death March. I quiz journalists returning from wars in Bosnia, the Sudan, the Congo, Angola, Indonesia, Guatemala, San Salvador, Chile, Northern Ireland, Algeria.

As I lay sleepless, I realized I’d done all this research to better understand my country. I now revere words like democracy, freedom, the right to vote, and the grandeur of the extraordinary vision of the founding fathers. Do I see America’s flaws? Of course. But I now can honor her basic, incorruptible virtues, the ones that let me walk the streets screaming my ass off that my country had no idea what it was doing in South Vietnam. My country let me scream to my heart’s content – the same country that produced both Al Kroboth and me.

Now, at this moment in New Jersey, I come to a conclusion about my actions as a young man when Vietnam was a dirty word to me. I wish I’d led a platoon of Marines in Vietnam. I would like to think I would have trained my troops well and that the Viet Cong would have had their hands full if they entered a firefight with us. From the day of my birth, I was programmed to enter the Marine Corps. I was the son of a Marine fighter pilot, and I had grown up on Marine bases where I had watched the men of the corps perform simulated war games in the forests of my childhood. That a novelist and poet bloomed darkly in the house of Santini strikes me as a remarkable irony. My mother and father had raised me to be an Al Kroboth, and during the Vietnam era they watched in horror as I metamorphosed into another breed of fanatic entirely. I understand now that I should have protested the war after my return from Vietnam, after I had done my duty for my country. I have come to a conclusion about my country that I knew then in my bones but lacked the courage to act on: America is good enough to die for even when she is wrong.

I looked for some conclusion, a summation of this trip to my teammate’s house. I wanted to come to the single right thing, a true thing that I may not like but that I could live with. After hearing Al Kroboth’s story of his walk across Vietnam and his brutal imprisonment in the North, I found myself passing harrowing, remorseless judgment on myself. I had not turned out to be the man I had once envisioned myself to be. I thought I would be the kind of man that America could point to and say, “There. That’s the guy. That’s the one who got it right. The whole package. The one I can depend on.”

It had never once occurred to me that I would find myself in the position I did on that night in Al Kroboth’s house in Roselle, New Jersey: an American coward spending the night with an American hero.

The first fully 3 dimensional creation (a piece of cloathing) ever made using 3 dimensional printing. was a bra, that was prepared using a visual scan of the “model” (I think Hot chick some nerd wanted to so get his first kiss from?) I mean, isn’t this what computers are made for? More boobies, more butts, more bra’s? Remember it’s a 3d printer so how far away are the . . . well you get the idea.

I forget who told the joke, but there is a comedian, “YES! Ladies, Deal with it, men invent almost everything, and you know what we are gonna do with it? Find a way to Eff it.”

“The same process can be used to make shirts, dresses and suits that are custom fitted using body scanning.”

Or. . . More Bra’s, that should be photographed when worn, because it’s SCIENCE!

Hugh was a part of Washington and took part in this stuff, and his clear disdain for the basic machinations of Washington is very refreshing. Wanna get rid of the chaff and find the wheat who is willing to actually work for a purpose? From now on, all government meetings will take place over skype or goto meeting. All the freeriders will quit and join various “charitable” foundations, or become professors and leave our government alone.

I am just amazed. It reminds me of when I was at Fort Gordon for my crypto courses, and one of the guys in the “rock” courses over a long weekend went outside of the designated diameter for a vacation to visit his family in Pennsylvania somewhere. He was almost home, and stopped at a rest stop to clean up a bit with his friend. He comes out, and hears a scream. Apparently a kid, just a few years old, walked away from his mom, and fell through the ice. The guy, cuz he was a Marine, and that’s what they do, ran out, got the info, and crawled out to get the kid, trying not to break the ice, his friend also a Marine crawled out in a different way basically to lend support. The kid went under, the guy goes into the water, and basically throws the kid to his friend, and then manages to crawl out.

The local paper played it up, Local Marine on Vacation Rescues Child. You know, good press stuff. But, BUT! he was outside the authorized diameter, and came back to get charged. ALSO When he got home, he had to go to the hospital because he was feeling sick, turned out to be nothing, but he lost a day, because he had the GALL! to be outside the allowed perimeter he got charged, (it was dropped because we all had phones and we called the local paper that ran the story in the first place, and the First Sgt, who was acting Plt Comm decided to drop the deal) but that story made me think of that.

As for people not being trained or Having the right gear, that’s a shame. If only there were, say, a private organization, that routinely trained Young Men, primarily Young Men who are Christian as an ASSOCIATION, that could train even NON-Christians, Like Say Me, to become Lifeguards in California. I know it’s just crazy talk, it’s not like such training could have any practical purpose other than indoctrinating children into the christian cult, I mean look at how successful with me, or that any USEFUL skills like being able to swim, perform rescues when necessary, and being SQ when they join the Marine Corps, in case their ship gets hit and they have to say, SWIM THROUGH BURNING OIL AND SHIT!

No, Completely useless. Maybe the California YMCA’s only cater to Village People Enthusiasts, but when I was a kid, they catered to Young Men who needed a place to train various skills, and Swimming was a big one. The Christian thing was a Hope, but not a requirement.

Some kid got suspended out of concern that he was making other non-white students uncomfortable since he clearly indicated a preference for White supremacy. Why? White kid, white t-shirt, you connect the dots duh.

But the funny part, the white principle who was responsible for this stupidity, while being interviewed, is wearing a white shirt. Clearly he knows of which he speaks.

I don’t think it’s a big deal, you wanna get your blood boiling about Anti-Palin rhetoric, read the comments sections in the different places where this is being hashed out.

What Labash did, when he referenced “naughty librarian glasses,” was lazy writing, and likely proof that people don’t bother to understand how all of this stuff gets out into the mainstream. He made the same mistake that the anchor of “The Tiffany Network,” made, when referencing the whole “I can see Russia from my house.” which wasn’t palin, but rather tina fey. The Naught Librarian thing, is from a brief statement that Palin offered on the Late Late Show, with Craig Ferguson shortly after she became Governor of Alaska. Palin sent a taped response to a late night comedian, knowing the nature of the situation, and decided to use it to promote her state, and deliver a little humor at the same time.

I don’t know about everyone else, but I didn’t know who the hell Palin was until the week before the announcement, and first thing I did was google her, that was before I started only using bing because google is fascist, and what was the most popular response before she became an evil evil evil fundamentalist, birther, young earth, neo-con, warmonger?

This is the vid of how everyone started using the naughty librarian thing.

So, maybe we should just fire all of the pundits, and hire craig ferguson and conan o’brien to offer us their political analysis.

Labash was lazy, and derogatory, but he was referencing a comedy show. What Craig did was all in good fun, and made it clear he was just telling a joke to the audience.

I am happy to report that this afternoon at 3:40 PM, the Los Angeles Unified School District voted to grant a charter to Extera Public Schools.

Classes begin on August 15th with 264 students (K – 3) in Boyle Heights – an area of our city burdened by great poverty and failing schools. Although getting a charter is a challenge, it pales in comparison to the challenge of building a great school. We are looking forward to all the hard work that lies ahead.

Good for him, also, the fact that it’s a charter challenging the liberal love affair of teachers unions. Good for him. Spent years as a scumbag with Rahmbo’s brother only to turn around and go “Hey! I’m rich, lets do something nice and effective.” Good on him. If he’s anything like the depictions of his former business partner, and his business partners brother, he will be one terrifying principal or chancellor or whatever role he serves other than financier.

I think that a lot of the reason that we use ever more complex methods of execution is because we want it to seem complex to execute a rotten piece of human scum. If we had a balistic catapult, I would rather put them in a contained vessel and send them out of the solar system to burn up in someone elses sun so we don’t have a monuent to the said piece of bipedal detritus, that should satisfy the complexity part of execution.

But as gabe points out there is a shortage of a particular drug that is used in lethal injection that is basically being forced off the market, purely for political “ethical” pomposity. Gabe pointed out an alternative, but I stand by my go to. It’s cheap, thought I can’t find references, It’s Plentiful and it’s “humane”. It also allows for an executed criminal to do one good thing at the end of their life, which is donate organs. I don’t know if both hanging and firing squad are still allowable options, but those are the only two methods that allow for organ donation.

Building a gas chamber is easy, in fact we don’t even need to, just a restraint mechanism and a well attached breathing mask. I would like to see some foreign country interfere with trade when our method of execution consists of the most plentiful component of our atmosphere. Embargo that you piece of crap nation that is routinely face internal strife because you are made up of a bunch of wussbags.

These death penalty arguments are so irritating. I to have a lot of problems with the application of the death penalty, but it doesn’t have to do with the death penalty, it has to do with how effed up portions of the legal system are. My problem isn’t the application of punishment upon a just verdict, even if I disagree with whether or not the crime the individual is guilt of rates death, that is a debate for society, I do have a problem with the level of gamesmenship the judicial/political industry of “trial lawyers,” have twisted the nature of evidence, casting doubt on numerous verdicts, especially the “not guilty” ones.

Privatizing air traffic control, as other nations have done, saves $38 billion.

That is just something that should have been obvious for more than 20 years if not longer, and there is absolutely no excuse for it now with the nature of our GPS technology. Not only can we do what other countries have done, we can do it at a premium because we own the networks. A lot of the other suggestions require accounting math, which isn’t the same as actual math apparently, but that one is just obvious. Not to mention it will reduce cost to airlines, allowing for more competition and greater accountability to existing firms to increase efficiency and allow for increased profits (as though many airlines make a profit) or reduced pricing. I see nothing wrong with either of those being the outcome of reducing cost of an irrational and unnecessary regulatory district.

Drawback? FAA will be virtually unnecessary. Too Bad, so Sad. I will get on the phone and dial whine one one and get them a Whaaaaaaaaaaaambulence.

Also, I’m not opposed to certain military cutbacks, but the F-22 NEEDS to be refunded before the infrastructure is completely gone. I don’t think we need bigger better carriers, I think we need bigger better armaments, I don’t think we need MORE tankers, I think we need better protected tankers, I don’t think we need MORE logistical vehicles, I think we need more efficient logistical vehicles. So some of the Defense spending? I wouldn’t mind seeing go bye bye (for instance, had no problem with Crusader being cut other than the research was done, but then I saw the per item cost, and I didn’t mind anymore. Paladin is perfectly fine.)

Meghan McCain, she the queen of true conservatism, wrote this piece of crap, and apparently got paid for it.

It opens in first paragraph,

I was one of the people on Time’s panel to nominate and argue over who was most deserving of the title. My two choices were the Tea Party and Mark Zuckerberg. The Time panel consisted of myself, Joe Trippi, Google’s Marissa Miller (who petitioned hard for Steve Jobs to be considered for Person of the Year), Wyclef Jean, and the executive director of the American Society for Muslim Advancement Daisy Khan.

So right there, 1/5 of the article is about how important she was with the other brilliant minds that chose the person of the year. Lets go through the List.

Wycleaf Jean who was supposedly having an affair with a woman who would rather have her baby starve than let it be cared for by white people.

Steve Jobbs, who is an EXCELLENT exec, but a lot of it is because he’s a Tyrant, watch the Docu on NeXT computers. He made arbitrary demands and everyone tells him it’s impossible, but he demands it while lying to investors.

and. . .

DAISY KHAN!

Meghan made a point of including DAISY EFFING KHAN! in the list. Does this woman understand anything? Daisy Effing KHAN!? The wife of the guy who thinks that opposition to the ground Zero Mosque is racist? The woman who said that Islam is MORE for womens freedom than the west? THAT Daisy Effing Khan?

Maybe if Meghan owned one of those things that Steve Jobs friend Steve Wozniak designed, Steve Jobs sold, Mark Zuckerberg capitalized on for his person of the year award, Trippi used to increase fundraising for Howard Dean Meghan might have realized how superficial and vacant her friggen “Collumn” was.

In fact, If Meghan had gotten on one of those new fangled things Steve Jobs helped popularize, and visited the location of Marissa Millers millions (google, but I suggest everyone use bing, google is fascist.) she might have found out about Daisy Khan, OR! Looked up the definition of “Poignant.”

Which I don’t think applies. To be sharply perceptive, you have to be at the leading edge, Facebook has been a force for YEARS, it’s not new, not this year, but maybe it’s just meghans misfortune that she only learned about it this year after watching the movie.

I also enjoy this Jewel of rhetorical genius.

Mark Zuckerberg has become the first true millenial rockstar, and he is ushering in a completely new era.

Go to the “collumn” for a pick of the “rockstar,” and watch the movie, read interviews about what a pleasant and engaging guy the freckled ginger is. Thanks Maggy, you paint word pictures with the skill and realism of salvadore dali having a seizer at the end of a coke binge. (don’t worry Maggy, you can look all of those things up on Wikipedia, Maybe you can vote for wikipedia next year, you rockstar.)

Here she uses one of the most INFURIATING rhetorical devices I see self absorbed, pompous privileged pieces of crap use.

He transcends all of these people and, dare I say, even countries because all of these subjects are more than likely to be read about, discussed, and debated via users on—where else?—Facebook.

How BOLD! You DARE to Say that! The Courage, the insight, the value, the willingness to protect principles. I cannot Believed that you Dare said that maggy. It’s almost as though you were writing about yourself and not about the (supposed) subject of the article. I mean, I wouldn’t know a GODDAMN THING about Zuckerberg If it wasn’t for your DARING to say that. Hell, I never would have known what Apple, Google, Facebook, The Ground Zero Victory Mosque, how democrats manipulate online donations to give false impressions of small contributions, or the fugee’s were, If not for your daring do!

Tell me stop eating stuff, that you are telling me to eat, better yet, how about you stop telling me to do anything unless you are my mom, my wife, my employer or my Plt Commander, that seems like a fair layout for legislative temperance.

“If you wouldn’t let your mom, wife/husband(but we all know that women never listen 🙂 employer or Plt Commander tell you to do something in particular, then we shouldn’t pass any law that would ask someone to do something that their mom, wife/husband(yeah, husband, they are so full of authority) employer or Plt Commander wouldn’t ask them to do.”

I think I have a very confusing, and somewhat non-sensical campaign slogan there.

Jason Beghe, who you might recognize, I mostly remember him as Tom Yinessa from 1st and 10, talks about his experience with scientology.

I really don’t care about Scientology myself, don’t judge the run of the mill Scientologist, even people like John Travolta and Tom Cruise. I guess they’re happy and quirky and the average person doesn’t have to deal with them, so fine. This interview, however, shows some strange stuff.

Language warning.

That is just part one, all 13 cuts, or the full unedited can be found if you go to Youtube. If bored and curious can also checkout Operation Clambake.